He Jia
Übergänge (Blending of Two Worlds)
The Chinese woman painter, He Jia, questions concepts of beauty and aesthetics of both eastern and western cultural backgrounds. As a consequence of not deciding in favour of one of the schools of painting, she develops a remarkable creation; traditional Chinese concepts of painting enter into a dynamic dialogue with western elements, intriguing the viewer to search for familiar motives.
He Jia was born in 1981 in Huhhot, Inner Mongolia. In 2003, after concluding her studies of classical Chinese painting at the Chinese Academy of Inner Mongolia, she went to Düsseldorf, Germany in order to study European painting, with the famous German artist and professor, Jörg Immendorff, at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf. To date, her paintings are predominantly familiar to a Chinese audience. Brussels Flamingo is hosting He Jia’s first European solo show. She recently participated at the group exhibition of Immendorff’s students at the academy at the Ludwig Museum in Koblenz, Germany in honour of the master, who just recently passed away.
He Jia employs an exceptional technique. She paints in oil in a manner that makes reference to expressionist watercolours. Landscapes and people are formed by dynamically putting one colourfield next to another.
She achieves a distinctive weightlessness by applying the oil paint with a very low viscosity that frequently leads the colour to float into and over adjacent fields. Only at first sight, this interaction seems to disturb the composition. These runlets actually bind the whole structure together.
Similar to He Jia’s erratic oil colour, the people she portrays on canvas also seem to undergo a state of change, captured in the moment of unpredictable passage between two situations. Only seldom is it possible to determine if a character is going back or forth, if he just arrived or if he is ready to depart. She always leaves blanks to be filled-in by the viewer’s subjective interpretation. Her characters, absorbed in their thoughts, seem to come to an important conclusion at that particular moment.
Besides these psychologically intense close-ups, He Jia depicts people in two other ways. Often, she shows them from behind, mostly young girls, while they gaze at something we as the viewer cannot see. Even though their faces are turned away from us, these characters emit amazement and otherworldliness. Finally, He Jia makes use of characters as pure decoration to vast natural scenes. Banned from the principal field of vision, they are positioned close to the painting’s border and adopt the function of the viewer of the image in the image. With this strategy, He Jia traceably follows an ancient Chinese composition concept.